Wednesday, September 06, 2006

Category greed

I think it's really, really great that people contribute documentation and third-party products to Plone and publish them on plone.org. However, as the reviewer of a lot of the submissions, I have one complaint:

80% of the items I review have selected four or five audiences (Oh, you know, this is relevant to site administrators, developers, advanced developers and integrators, customisers, maybe), or two or three product categories (hey, there's code here, so let's call it a code example, and also it could go into the misc category, and really, it's a service so let's put it there too).

Unfortunately, that just makes the categories less useful to everyone.

This is why we have reviewers, but reviewers forget to check the categories (or they make the same mistake) and we end up with cruft. We could change these to a single-select field, but there are cases where we need multiple categories. Perhaps we could introduce a validator that means only reviewers can select more than one category, but this is somewhat clunky.

So please - apply some critical judgement. The categories are there to make it easier to browse the content, as the listings are grouped by them. If every grouping has every item, then we may as well just not have categories.

7 comments:

-- this comment does not relate to this post -- just a general feedback FYI.

I am subscribing to the planet.plone.org RSS feed through my Google aggregator (http://www.google.com/ig). All the feeds are coming through well except your posts -- there I am getting an xml file display only.

An on-topic comment: there was a template once that we used when cleaning up the categories. Can that one be resurrected? Or is it still there? I don't mind going through that list once in a while to flush them out.